Silicon Power is a relatively new name in the storage industry. Founded in 2003 by a group of professionals specializing in international business, global marketing and technical engineering, the company has already established itself as one of Taiwan's top manufacturers. With an eye for attractive and versatile design, Silicon Power has built its brand around the concept that its customers deserve products that represent who they are in life and mirror their personality. The end result is a variety of uniquely designed storage products including USB flash drives, memory cards and solid-state drives (SSD).

This spring, Silicon Power launched two new budget friendly SSDs, the Velox V55 and Slim S55. Designed for the cost-conscious consumer looking to upgrade their system to a SSD, the V55 and S55 are powered by Phison's PS3108-S8 processor and feature a SATA 6GB/s interface, TRIM support and a 512MB cache. Both drives are also equipped with up to 480GB of MLC NAND flash to deliver up to 556 MB/s read and 500 MB/s write speeds. The only real difference between the two drives is the form factor. Where the V55 is 9mm thick and can be installed in a desktop or standard notebook PC, the 7mm thick S55 is perfect for ultrabooks or ultra-slim notebooks.

For this review, Silicon Power sent us the 240GB version of the Slim S55. This SSD is capable of delivering up to 556 MB/s sequential read and 480 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as a maximum of 80,000 4K random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the Slim S55 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Silicon Power's new SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the S55 have what it takes? Can it deliver the value and performance we've come to expect from Silicon Power? Keep reading as we find out.